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Elizabeth Warren "dropping out"

This campaign is not over

By Steve LlanoPublished 4 years ago 7 min read
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My social media feed has been filled with stories and images of young people, mostly women, who are spending their own time and money to head across the country and canvas for Elizabeth Warren.

I have taught at the university level for over 15 years now, and there has been no shortage of students over the years who have been enamored with a candidate and put off their education, their career, and their lives to support them. I often shook my head. I really don't understand why they would put their own lives on hold to support some oligarch's quest for ultimate power in the White House.

But there's something a bit different about the Warren campaign. Recently I wrote a piece for C-SPAN where I examined her Presidential announcement speech. There are several interesting elements of it that do not normally appear in Presidential announcements.

All Presidential candidates seek to identify with their audience. This is not news to scholars of rhetoric; identification is an essential part of any persuasive speech. When you seek to move an audience, you have to work to ensure that they identify with your topic, or the side of the issue you take. This goes beyond logic and reason - this is where the audience sees themselves as people who want to be on that side.

Here's an example: Imagine you want your audience to attend a specific community event. Instead of giving them the logical reasons they should go to the event - or even the benefits that they would get from attending, you spend a large part of your speech constituting them as the kind of high quality, smart, and special people who would be seen at such an event. By appealing to how they imagine themselves, you make them want to attend because it completes the fantasy of their identity for them.

Warren's announcement speech contains many moments of identification like this, but they are not universal. She chooses to constitute her audience as hard-working women who fight against all odds for an equal place in society. Here's a representative quote:

"I want to tell you a story. A little over 100 years ago, textile mills in Lawrence like the ones behind us today employed tens of thousands of people, and immigrants flocked here from more than 50 countries for a chance to work at the looms. Lawrence was one of the centers of American industry. Business was booming. The guys at the top were doing great, but workers made so little money that families were forced to crowd together in dangerous tenements and live on beans and scraps of bread. Inside the mills, working conditions were horrible. Children were forced to operate dangerous equipment. Workers lost hands, arms and legs in the gears of machines. One out of every three adult mill workers died by the time they were 25. Then, on January 11, 1912, a group of women who worked right here at the Everett Mill discovered that the bosses had cut their pay. And that was it — the women said “enough is enough.” They shut down their looms and walked out. Soon workers walked out at another mill in town. Then another. Then another — until 20,000 textile workers across Lawrence were on strike. These workers — led by women– didn’t have much. Not even a common language. Nevertheless… they persisted!

This story sets up the type of person that Warren wants her audience to imagine they are. It's easy to do when you construct it around horrific working conditions from the last century. But now she has to apply it to contemporary conditions in order to make the connection work:

The story of Lawrence is a story about how real change happens in America. It’s a story about power — our power — when we fight together. Today, millions and millions and millions of American families are also struggling to survive in a system that has been rigged by the wealthy and the well-connected. Hard working people are up against a small group that holds far too much power, not just in our economy, but also in our democracy. Like the women of Lawrence, we are here to say enough is enough! We are here to take on a fight that will shape our lives, our children’s lives and our grandchildren’s lives, just as surely as the fight that began in these streets more than a century ago.

This connects her campaign, and everyone there to hear her and work on the campaign with her as the brave individuals who stood up against the odds for the mill workers long ago. The struggles are not similar; they are the same. Justice is not a reason to support Warren's campaign; justice is the campaign. We believe the actions of the women in Lawrence were just, so we are just.

This might seem a bit simple, or a bit insulting, but it really isn't. It's the careful way an orator builds a common point from which persuasion can happen. It isn't ethical to just hit an audience with your idea; you are not giving them a fair chance to accept it. Every speaker has the ethical duty to present their ideas in the most acceptable way they can to an audience. Considering how the audience sees itself, and what they believe they are is a great way to let them know what they are already capable of, what actions will complete or go with that identity. Kenneth Burke writes that style is "a sense of what goes with what."

This powerful constitution of her audience was never dispelled, so to speak. When Warren dropped out of the campaign, she did not endorse anyone. In her capitulation, she decided to keep the audience where she had placed them in her announcement speech:

So take some time to be with your friends and family, to get some sleep, maybe to get that haircut you’ve been putting off. Do things to take care of yourselves, gather up your energy, because I know you are coming back. I know you — and I know that you aren’t ready to leave this fight.

You know, I used to hate goodbyes. Whenever I taught my last class or when we moved to a new city, those final goodbyes used to wrench my heart. But then I realized that there is no goodbye for much of what we do.

She's keeping them constituted, not asking them to disperse, to support Sanders or Biden, or anyone.

Her twitter account also shared this interesting video, which raises some questions about what she's trying to do.

Warren is well aware she has constituted an audience that is interested in a lot more than simply the Presidency. There's a structural call here, a call to dismantle a particular attitude about the Presidency. The moment with Bloomberg from the debate becomes a representative anecdote - a moment that stands in for a much larger sentiment, a much larger attitude about the world - that Warren has equated with the goal for her audience.

There's a lot of talk about the danger of the "berniebros," young hipster men who believe Bernie Sanders is some sort of "outsider" who would really change things, and they won't support anyone else but him for the Presidency, even to the detriment of the country.

I think it's much more important to be talking about the large audience that Warren has constituted here and how they feel. There has been no attempt by the Democratic Party to create a connection between supporting Sanders or Biden to Warren's campaign. She probably will not do it. Warren's supporters are constituted as engaged in a structural critique and structural change of the system of electing the President itself.

Part of this just effort is standing up to old, sexist, white men. They are not going to be persuaded; they are obstacles in the way of this structural change. And the Democrats assume that these young people are just going to support Sanders or Biden, both men who have demonstrated sexist discourse or behavior many times in their lives, and are unapologetic for it.

I wouldn't be surprised if many Warren supporters do not vote, and argue that not voting is a valid political position that is an endorsement of change of the electoral system itself. As Herbert Marcuse wrote in One Dimensional Man, "The Great Refusal is the refusal to participate in a game where you know that the dice have been loaded." Warren's start to her campaign, and the ending to it, constitute an audience that could refuse to play in the name of justice. Warren and her supporters might refuse to play under the rhetorical banner of "persisting." And they might not be wrong to do so.

politicians
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About the Creator

Steve Llano

Professor of Rhetoric in New York city, writing about rhetoric, politics, and culture.

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